Page 79 of Reckless Heir
"You look wonderful," Niko says, covering smoothly as the song shifts. "Whatever you're going to say, let it be that."
He means it as kindness. It lands as grief, briefly, the specific grief of someone who misses the version of themselves that had an easy answer toare you alright.But I'm smiling genuinely now — a real one, not the performance — and I hate how much I needed this: five minutes of someone from before. Five minutes of being Sofia-who-has-a-brother and a lemon tree and a gap year that actually happened.
I'm still smiling when the temperature in the room drops.
Not a feeling. An actual drop. Niko feels it too — I watch his eyes track past my shoulder and his expression shift, the easy warmth going careful.
Aleksei.
He doesn't say anything. He appears at my side like weather — suddenly, completely — and takes my hand from Niko's with a movement so smooth it barely registers as the seizure it is. His grip on my fingers is light. His eyes on Niko are not.
"Romanov." Niko's voice is perfectly pleasant. "Lovely event."
"Drakos." One word. Total.
A beat. Niko tips his glass slightly toward me — a small, private acknowledgement, a message I'll think about later — and makes a graceful retreat. I watch him go and then I'm being moved, not roughly but with the particular certainty of a man who has decided where we're going, through the crowd and down a corridor hung in velvet curtains that swallows the music behind us.
I yank my hand free.
"Was that necessary?"
"Yes."
"He's Luca's friend. He was being kind?—"
"I know what he was being." He turns, and the corridor is dark except for the spill of candlelight under the curtain, and his eyes are very dark, burning with something he's not naming. "You were smiling."
"You're allowed to smile at people," I say. "I'm not a locked room?—"
"I know that." His voice drops. "That's not—" He stops. Puts one hand flat on the wall beside my head and leans in, not touching me, just close, filling the space between us with heatand barely-contained something. "You smiled at him the way you smile when you're not performing. The real one. And I?—"
His jaw tightens.
"You what?" I say, and my voice comes out quieter than I intend.
"I did it for both of us," he says. The words come out rough, like they've been waiting. "The distance. The silence. The rules. Not because I don't—" He stops again. His free hand lifts and I watch it hover, not quite touching my face. "Because if I start, Sofia. If I actually start." His eyes find mine and hold them and I see it, finally, the thing he's been containing — not cold, not clinical, but vast and focused and frightening. "I won't stop."
The corridor breathes around us.
I tilt my chin up.
He kisses me.
Not soft. Not careful. Nothing like the first time or any of the versions that came before — this is something different, something that has run out of patience with itself, his hand finding my jaw and his mouth on mine with a hunger that tastes like all the nights he spent not admitting it. I grab the lapels of his jacket because the alternative is falling and he presses me back against the velvet-draped wall and I let him, I pull him closer.
My hands find his belt.
He groans against my mouth — low, desperate, the sound of someone losing an argument they thought they'd already won. His hands close around my wrists, stilling them, pinning them gently to the wall.
He pulls back.
Breathing hard. Eyes dark. His forehead drops to mine.
"I won't do this when I'm angry," he says. Rough. Like the words are costing him. "Not here. Not like this."
"You seem?—"
"I'm not angry at you." His thumbs trace the inside of my wrists, still pinned, and I feel it everywhere. "I'm angry at myself. There's a difference." He lifts his head. His eyes move over my face with the specific quality of someone memorizing something. "Don't confuse that for mercy."
